


our hearts from iron

by forcynics



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Guns, References to Suicide, Violence, suicidal behaviour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 11:31:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6115168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forcynics/pseuds/forcynics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was eight when she won her first archery competition, and her grandfather wasn’t there but her father was. He smiled like her grandfather is smiling now, and the similarities between father and son have never struck her quite like this. <i>Pride,</i> that’s something she can feed on, but there’s more to it, an inherent self-compliment that is <i>I made you, you are this because of me,</i> and she doesn’t shiver but she drops her eyes.</p><p>“Leave him to me,” and there’s the verdict they asked for. Her fingers loosen, and she doesn’t look at either of them.</p><p>“Scott’s mine,” but her voice shakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our hearts from iron

**Author's Note:**

> this is set around 2x10/2x11, after allison's mother dies and she goes after the werewolves.
> 
> fun fact, i wrote the vast majority of this fic three years ago, when that was still recent on teen wolf, but i never polished up the last bits and pieces and it was always the fic i most regretted never publishing, until i found it today and decided i wanted to after all. so. here we go.

 

 

“What about Scott?” her father asks, and Allison doesn’t have an answer.

Her fingers trace the line of her bow and clench, and she doesn’t have an answer. Her father is staring at her and her grandfather is staring at her, and their gazes make her rigid. They call her leader and they wait for her command, and she has nothing to give.

_Scott is separate from this._

She could insist, defend. Her knuckles are white; her fingers criss-cross.

_Scott is the same as Derek._

She could give the order, pass the sentence. Her mouth is dry.

“Scott should hope he doesn’t get in the way.” It feels brittle, to say the words and make them true, acknowledge that she cannot predict how she will react to Scott. He is the one unknown in their plans, and it makes her feel like she is slowly splintering from head to toe. She is stronger than that now; she is filling in her cracks, shaping new bones poured of metal alloy to hold herself together.

Her father nods slowly, and her grandfather smiles. Her father saw the uncertainty, and her grandfather saw the threat.

She was eight when she won her first archery competition, and her grandfather wasn’t there but her father was. He smiled like her grandfather is smiling now, and the similarities between father and son have never struck her quite like this. _Pride,_ that’s something she can feed on, but there’s more to it, an inherent self-compliment that is _I made you, you are this because of me,_ and she doesn’t shiver but she drops her eyes.

“Leave him to me,” and there’s the verdict they asked for. Her fingers loosen, and she doesn’t look at either of them.

“Scott’s mine,” but her voice shakes.

 

 

 

Her father finds her in her bedroom, turning a knife over in her hands and studying how the light bounces on the metal. He stops mid-step, barely noticeable, and then pushes forward, crosses the room and drops a hand light on her shoulder.

“Allison.”

A bow is a good weapon from a distance, but a knife is better face-to-face. She’s not at a distance from this fight anymore.

“You said Mom did it with something like this.” _Turn_ , and the light glares so bright she can’t see her reflection.

Her dad’s hand tightens around her shoulder bone, and she can picture how his face might tense up, but she doesn’t check.

“I’m trying to imagine,” she says, just above a whisper now, “how much strength it would take, to stab this into a body.” Skin then muscle then bone. _But not everyone is metal through and through._

“She never wanted you to think she was weak.” Her dad sounds like he might be close to crying, like if she did look up there would be tears in his eyes, maybe even rolling down his face. She can’t picture it though. She doesn’t look up.

“I don’t.” She turns the knife over again.

He sits down on her bed beside her, and his grip loosens, but she still doesn’t look. She bites the insides of her cheeks, and she focuses on how her knuckles are turning white.

“Allison,” her dad says again, stops like just saying her name takes a breath of its own. “When you were born—you know, I always thought the hardest thing we’d ever do would be raising you. I never knew how much to say—or _when_ to say it, how to possibly say it... I swear, parents always remember how _small_ their children used to be, but I always wanted you to be prepared—”

Prepared for all the monsters everyone assured her were never real.

Her dad clears his throat. “Do you know what you’re doing? You’re calling the shots on this, but are you sure—”

“You trained me,” she interrupts. “Even when I didn’t know it. You were always training me. I should be asking you, did you do a good job?”

His hand wraps around hers, tugs her knuckles loose while he takes the knife away. He squeezes, bone sliding against bone.

“You won’t let us down.”

She’s the one calling the shots, but it still sounds like a command.

 

 

 

“What are you doing?”

“Get out of my way.”

That was the plan – hope Scott stayed away, got away, ran away as fast as he could. She’s holding her crossbow up to his face in the dark corridor of the police station, and she wants him to run fast in the opposite direction so she can justify it when she lets him.

His hands go in the air instead, when the last thing she wants is caution. Violence is ripping through the building all around them and it’s not enough to distract from the concern in his eyes.

“Allison, what’s going on?”

She grits her teeth. “Move, Scott. Run away.” But of course he doesn’t. Of course Scott is still there, of course Scott can’t disappear from any of this any more than she can, of course she can’t wish him out of the picture just because he’s the variable.

“I don’t want to kill you.” Maybe it’s dramatic, but maybe that’s why she says it—because he’s a werewolf and her family legacy stretches back across centuries of men and women who’ve hunted werewolves, because her own mother hunted werewolves until one of them finally got its teeth in her and even though that wasn’t Scott it makes it easier to imagine releasing the arrow.

But Scott is coming _closer_ , like he trusts in her steady hands more than she does, like he knows she’ll let him cross the distance. His hands touch her arms. She jerks back, and her bow clatters to the floor. She has knives in her belt for such close distance.

Her father and her grandfather looked at her with pride in her eyes, and they are trusting her to know how to do this.

_Hunt werewolves._

“I don’t want to kill you.” And she just—can’t stop saying it, desperate and terrified and hands clutching at his shirt when he tries to move in, only to push him away and take the necessary steps back. She’s shaking with violence even in such close quarters, trembling skin stretched over bones of new steel, too strong to need Scott to hold her up.

“You know I’d never do anything,” he’s saying, and the worst bit is how hurt he sounds, when Allison has nothing left in her to feel anyone else’s hurt. “I thought we were working together—I thought we were on the same side in this—” and she’s hysterical, but she laughs, and bites her tongue hard when she clenches her jaw on the sound.

“We were _never_ on the same side, Scott.” Not when the sides stretch back over legacies, not when her mother is gone and it makes her feel a child more than ever.

“You’re one of them. And if you get in my way—”

“You’ll shoot me too?” His eyes are as wide as if he doesn’t believe it. Maybe he truly doesn’t.

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” she admits, and feels claustrophobic even with the distance between them. “That’s the problem, Scott.”

His expression tightens, like he’s pulling himself all together, jaw clenched and eyes narrowed and skin stretched tight. She doesn’t recognize the expression. Not on Scott.

 

 

 

Her hands never shake when she’s holding her bow.

She doesn’t think of target practice and competitions, because the wolf isn’t a target. He is flesh and fur knotted together, and his bones are so much weaker than hers. He has no armour, nothing to stop her arrows from piercing through, and he is not a target painted red and white but her arrows score perfect where she aims. It’s the other wolf that’s screaming. Erica Reyes is screaming, and she only has one arrow in her.

“Stop!” she screams. She pleads. She’s far too late.

Allison knows her mother never would have screamed, faced with wolves and bites and death. Her mother didn’t scream. Her mother wasn’t weak like this little wolf girl.

Her hands never shake as she releases arrows.

 

 

 

She pinned a picture of Derek Hale to a wall once, and shot it with arrows. The picture she chooses of Scott is a picture of both of them, arms twined and smiling, happy and foolish and disgustingly naive. They thought themselves Romeo and Juliet, thought it daring and romantic and star-crossed, and forget how the story ends.

Allison notches her arrow, and Allison releases, and Allison doesn’t miss, hitting right where they are touching in the picture. If she were eight years old, there would be applause, and there would be a medal to hang on her wall. The backyard is silent, and she’s not a little girl who needs a prize.

She notches another arrow, and hits Scott in the eye. There’s a flare of light in the photograph, erupting around where her arrow is embedded, like it really hit and that’s how he seeps blood.

She notches another arrow for herself, for good measure. _It’s pathetic, Allison,_ she remembers, and her arrow hits true, slays another foe. She was still a little girl, only weeks ago, but now the little girl is as dead as her mother. She doesn’t stare too long; she stares at the arrow sunk in Scott’s eye instead, until she can’t stare anymore.

 _Leave Scott to me. He’s mine._ She still doesn’t know what to do with that.

 

 

 

“I’ll kill you,” she tells him, voice steady. It’s a gun in her hand this time, shiny silver Argent bullet-loaded and cocked at Scott, an impossible five feet away in the woods. 

“I’ll do it,” she tells him again. Tells herself.

“Go on then,” Scott’s voice shakes. “But I didn’t kill your mother. Derek didn’t either, she—she did it to herself, Allison, she made a choice—”

“It was the strongest thing she ever did,” Allison echoes her father and Scott flinches. She turns the gun, points it right at her own head— “Maybe I’ll go just like my mother, show them just how _strong_ they made me,” she snarls. “She thought she was the strongest, and she was—it takes so much to push a knife through flesh, but what about this, Scott, what about a simple little trigger—”

And he moves so quickly, knocks the gun away from her before she ever stood a chance. He could have knocked it away before she ever could have pulled it on him. She forgets how strong he is, envies him so deeply.

“Stop trying to be such a fucking hero,” she spits out, chest heaving, gun in the mud on the forest floor, and Scott still trying to save her after everything.

“Me?” It bubbles out of Scott, pure disbelief across his face, before his features settle into anger. “You’re the one trying to—” He can barely choke it out, staring at her like he doesn’t know what’s in front of him. 

“—trying to go kill all the _monsters_ like that’ll fix everything.”

Scott’s not a monster and she’s not a hero. He’s a boy standing too close to her and she can’t make herself reach for the knives at her waist. 

“Don’t do that,” she stumbles on the words, stumbles on the night air and the lack of space between them. “Don’t make me a hero either, don’t make me anything, don’t—”

They’re all just words that are supposed to mean something, supposed to shape her, like she’s malleable instead of forged strong, but she’s heaving for breath and Scott’s fingers are wrapped around her hand that held the gun, and she crumples into him, clutching onto whatever she can grab.

His fingers press into her back, and a shiver runs down to her toes, makes her tilt her face up to him. She traces over the bone under his eye, then scrapes her thumb down his jaw and shudders again. He’s close enough it would be so easy if she reached for her knives. He’s close enough to kiss her, and she doesn’t know if she would melt or break, but he doesn’t.

So she does. She surges forward, kisses him angry and yearning with her fingers running up his arm and digging into his skin, trying to break through.

Scott is strong and she forgets it, forgets it because it shouldn’t count. He never asked for it, never wanted it. Everything about his strength is not of his making. He never refashioned his own bones to keep himself standing.

She almost wants him to bite her, so she could have that same strength that is so inherent in him. She bites his lip instead, tastes the rust of blood and it plunges through her. When did they become so metallic? When did it become interchangeable, what they’re made of?

“You’re not a monster either,” Scott whispers when she breaks away, draws back the smallest distance from him, just enough to breathe. His fingers are burning on her skin, his hair brushes her face, and his lip catches on hers when he tries to talk.

“Don’t—” she says, shakes her head, pulls away. 

It’s not for Scott to say what she is.

 

 

 

Once upon a time, they were young and foolish and in love and then the story ended, real life ripped it to shreds with a rusty metal knife stabbed through its heart, and here they are.

They paint a pretty picture of love destroyed, or so she might have said but that’s not the whole story. She’s destroyed, she’s the one who fell apart.

Whatever there was between Scott and her, it still exists. It is still pulsing, pulling them in bit by metal bit.

 

 


End file.
